Last week, PC Pro challenged its readers to see whose rig could render a 3D graphics benchmark the quickest. An Intel engineer took the prize using a test rig overclocked to nearly 5GHz and cooled to -40 degrees Celsius.

So, maybe that's cheating a little bit. The rig's phase-cooled, thanks to the huge freezer box on the right side of the above photo. You're not reading that thermometer wrong—it's running at minus 40 degrees Celsius.

Steve, the Intel engineer in question, giddily supplied some specs for the machine, which ran the benchmark in 50 seconds:

And if you're not quite impressed, they're planning on getting it both cooler and faster:

I would expect that as we cool the processor further down to extreme cold temperatures (-180C) with Liquid nitrogen cooling, we would see stable runs on this benchmark in the 5.7-6.0ghz range.
We'll be doing some extreme overclocking around the end of august and I'll add this benchmark to the list to see if we can provide an even more impressive result.